There are two concepts in Jewish law that help to frame it all: להתחילה l’hat’khilah and בדיעבד b’di’avad.
L’hat’khilah captures the Jewish mindset of the Ideal – we might express it using a phrase like “all things being equal” or just “ideally”. In halakhah, the Jewish path of life, it expresses the sense of how you feel when you are just starting out.
B’di’avad means “after it happened.” The concept stands exactly opposite to l’hat’khilah: while ideally HaShem meant for us to live in a garden, now we are dealing with life outside and beyond that (divine?) dream of perfection.
Parashat VaYetze is a moment of coming to terms with the chasm between how we envisioned it and what we’re actually dealing with in just this way. The term יצא yetze means “go out.” In so many aspects of the story we are walking with human beings who must face the contrast between what they hoped and what is in their hands, between the mindset they had cherished for their existence and its ruins, which they now go out from toward whatever will be now, in real life:
Jacob, freshly blessed by his father as the favored child, nonetheless running for his life from his cheated brother; and Rachel and Leah, sisters both married to Jacob, one realizing that she is not loved and the other that she is not able to get pregnant. Life goes in and one must walk its path, choosing at every moment how to step among the rubble of perfect dreams and plans that will not be realized.
My teacher, Dr Byron Sherwin ז“ל used to say that the difference between the two states of being is that the former is a state of “messianic ethics,” while we live in a world of “messy ethics.” Life is often disappointing, people are usually hurting, and nothing really works out the way you thought it would, or hoped.
For our teachers who seek illumination from mystical teachings, the pain and disappointment of our lives is traceable to a brokenness in the world, or what we would call the universe, but what we might more mystically call the All, the place in which we all dwell within HaShem in a unity that connects each of us to each other in ways both profoundly necessary and consciously unbearable.
Our siblings in Israel are going out from the bedrock belief they had in the institutions of their society to protect and defend them. The very ground of their lives, and in a real way, ours as well, has shifted forever – whether or not you felt the shifting already years ago in warnings that this State was not upholding its own stated ideals for how it would treat all peoples within its borders, or whether you were able to rest confidently in the idea that all would be well one day soon and that in the meantime all the human rights abuses were in service to security.
Members of our own community struggle in different ways to find our path as we are forced into a similar kind of going out from what we thought was our world. The antisemitism so many experience, as we see that what pains us does not bring empathy from those we thought were our friends and trusted comrades, leaves us isolated and grieving.
The American Jewish community is now experiencing something that many of our people never thought possible: that this country, too, is only a stop along the way in our long Jewish Exile. This is a time for deep and courageous Torah study; we need to be able to let the veils fall from our eyes and ask our ancestors for the wisdom of their bidi’avad lives and learning.
Our ancestors did not – at least not all of them – fall apart under the emotional stress of having to pick their way through the rubble of their dreams. Some of them managed to discern a messily ethical way forward, and they are the ones we follow. Not those who diminish themselves into complaints and attacks on others, but those whose hearts grow stronger, and whose vision does not falter despite the proximate collapse.
Jacob went forth as his tarnished, damaged self into a void of the unknown, and it did not empty his life of meaning. Rachel and Leah both built enduring houses of descendants both biological and adopted, demonstrating new ways of creating family and relationships.
In our own day, as our resilience is tested, may we find the strength and courage to act in ways that transcend our disappointment and fear, and so be counted among those whom our tradition praises as she’arit Yisrael, the “saving remnant of Israel.” It’s a term we’ve used for a long time as a way to look for the path forward as some few who manage to hold it together show us, ever since the first days of the first Exile:
“Because you have all become dross, therefore behold, I gather you together.” (Ezekiel 22.19) Therefore He gathered them to send them into exile, because through this the good among them will be sorted out and will be a remnant and a remainder in their exile, as it says “The Lord showed me two pots of figs…” (Jeremiah 24:1) It explains there that the exile of Yochanya was like good figs, because He sent them to Babylon for the good as a saved remnant separating them from the bad figs which remained there and were a curse. (Malbim on Ezekiel 22:19:1)
We don’t know what’s next; we only know that we are profoundly fortunate to be part of a people that is familiar with the broken heart, so that on the day when we ourselves face hard times, we are not alone. Even better, we have teachings to guide us while we stumble about, not entirely in the darkness, and stressed out. The Kotzker Rebbe, who knew a little something about what it means to live a hard life, once taught:
Why is it written in the Shema “put these words upon your heart” rather than in your heart? Because a person who is whole and happy cannot let anything into their heart. So we lay the words on our hearts until the day when the heart breaks. Only on that day will the words find their way in.
Hazak hazak v’nit’hazek, let us find our strength together,
Torah for the 21st Century by Rabbi Ariel Stone 